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Exploring Attitudes to Online Grieving on Facebook Through Survey Research

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Exploring Attitudes to Online Grieving on Facebook Through Survey Research Webology, Volume 13, Number 1, June, 2016 Home Table of Contents Titles & Subject Index Authors Index Exploring attitudes to online grieving on Facebook through survey research Eugenia Kuznetsova PhD, Researcher, University of Deusto, Av. Universidades 24, Bilbao, Spain. E-mail: jay.kuznetsova (at) gmail.com Alexander Ronzhyn PhD, Researcher, University of Deusto, Av. Universidades 24, Bilbao, Spain. E-mail: me (at) ronzhyn.com Received May 28, 2016; Accepted June 25, 2016 Abstract The research explores the process of grieving in an online environment, aiming to answer the question of how users perceive grieving practices on Facebook. The article is based on a survey of Facebook users, in which they estimate the importance of the topic and anonymously share their personal experiences related to death on Facebook. The survey aims to define how age, Facebook experience (frequency, motivations, number of friends) and also personality traits correlate with acceptance of different grieving practices in online context. Survey input left by the users with first-hand experience of death on Facebook shows the comforting effect of Facebook grieving after the loss of a valued person in the user’s life. At the same time, those users who did not have any emotional personal ties with the deceased or their relatives, tended to regard online grieving as superficial or disturbing experience. Keywords Online grieving; Online memorial; Online mourning; Facebook; Death 1 http://www.webology.org/2016/v13n1/a144.pdf Introduction The discussion about social networks and their influence on grieving practices in contemporary society began in the early 2000s. In the mass media we can find reflections on whether it is appropriate to tweet a funeral (Ingram, 2014), about the oddity of a Facebook funeral and smiling avatars (Kavulla, 2007), on the voyeurism of watching the life and death of Facebook friends (Bolick, 2010), about social media etiquette surrounding death (Buck, 2013) and on R.I.P. pages as a catalyst for participation (Kern, Forman, & Gil-Egui, 2013). There have also been discussions about ways to handle digital assets after death (Kaleem, 2012), legal aspects of controlling the pages of deceased people (Eder, 2013) and current policies and the factors that shaped the policy and procedures that define Facebook after death (McCallig, 2013). Such discussions are absolutely logical in the current stage of social media development. After a decade of the rapidly growing popularity of all kinds of online social networks, the majority of users have had personal experience of dealing with profiles of deceased people in social media. The mass media expresses anxiety regarding the “virtual cemetery” and the growing number of “dead profiles” (Kaleem, 2012). Randall Munroe, a blogger in the field of popular science, forecasted that based on the Facebook growth rate and the age breakdown of its users over time, there may be more dead users than living ones on Facebook in either the 2030s or the 2060s (Munroe, 2012). In general on the internet over the last decade, subjects related to death and grieving have become “overwhelmingly common features” (Mcmahon, 2010). “Social media etiquette surrounding death is a delicate and highly subjective construct. What one person views as good judgment could translate as incredibly poor taste or downright offensive to others.” (Buck, 2013) Grieving online has been researched from different perspectives. A rhetorical analysis of Facebook Memorials has been conducted (Brooks, 2014) as well as analyses of the bonds in the virtual world and the role of Facebook in adolescent grief (James, 2014). Other researchers have provided insight into how people use search engines in times of grief and bereavement (Ruthven, 2012) or how the online grieving process is constructed on YouTube (Dinning-brinkmann, 2010) and MySpace (Malenkovich, 2013). The positive psychological effect of the online grieving process has been confirmed in a number of studies. Online social networks have been proven to serve as the catalyst for participation in and creation of online communities (Kern et al., 2013) and to reduce panic and anxiety in the mourning process (Beretsky, 2012). Online social networks have transformed the grieving process (Brubaker, Hayes, & Dourish, 2013), making it more public and thus bringing relief to those who mourn (Buck, 2013). Related psychological research indicates that Facebook may have a negative influence on users by, for example, causing a decrease in mood (Sagioglou & Greitemeyer, 2014) or potentially having an effect on loneliness (Song et al., 2014). 2 http://www.webology.org/2016/v13n1/a144.pdf However, most academic works concentrate on the analysis of existing practices of grieving, and thus they research the phenomenon of grief in online contexts from the perspective of the experiences of users who are directly involved in the grieving process online. The present article makes an insight into the grieving process from the perspectives of users who are not necessarily involved in the grieving process. The survey also gave the respondents the opportunity to share their personal experiences and opinions in open-ended questions (158 respondents left replies describing their own stories and feelings related to death on Facebook). The researchers who investigate the death and grieving in social media also have to take into account the certain level of death related scepticism among users. This is explained by numerous cases of fake deaths in social media. The famous Tom Sawyer’s prank became available to everyone via social networks. There are well documented cases when individuals fake their own deaths and watched the reaction of their online friends (Chan, 2012; Veix, 2015). This may cause the scepticism of some users related to healing effect of grieving online. The hypothesis of the research is that despite the academic studies confirming the healing effect of online grieving, the major part of users has ambiguous feelings about grieving practices on Facebook or even finds them inacceptable. Materials and Methods The data was collected through a survey available online. The link to the survey has been shared on Facebook and Reddit. The online questionnaire designed for the research consists of three parts. The first part defines standard demographic variables (sex and age) and also Facebook use and experience (overall experience on Facebook, number of friends, usage frequency and pur- poses of using Facebook). The second part is devoted to attitudes to online grieving practices and other aspects of dealing with death on Facebook. The third and last part includes the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) of the Big-Five personality dimensions. The TIPI was designed and tested by Gosling et al. (2003) and has been proven to be a reliable measure of the five personali- ty traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability); see also five-factor model of personality (Digman, 1990). TIPI as a personality measure was found to reach adequate levels of convergent and discriminant validity and test–retest reliability (mean r= .72, compared to mean r= .80 for the longer BFI (John & Srivastava, 1999) and is recom- mended as a reasonable and proxy for Big-Five measure in situations where personality is not the primary focus of the research (Gosling et al., 2003). Our motivation to use the shortened version was also dictated by the length of survey. Since this was an online survey where a respondent can quit at any moment, we were mostly interested in making the maximum number of respond- ents to complete the survey. Including larger Big-Five personality measures in the online survey would significantly increase the number of incomplete surveys (Robins, Trzesniewski, Tracy, Gosling, & Potter, 2002). 3 http://www.webology.org/2016/v13n1/a144.pdf In total 541 completed questionnaires were submitted through the online form available during February 2015. The collected sample is gender-balanced: 55.1 percent of all respondents identified themselves as being male and 44.9 as female. The sample is skewed towards younger users: almost half of the respondents (44.7%) reported their age within the 18-25 interval and 25.3 percent are between 26 and 35 years old. The majority of respondents (60.1%) have been using Facebook for more than five years, while only 1.8 percent said they have been on Facebook for less than a year. 85.9 percent indicated using Facebook at least every couple of days, thus the sample is comprised mostly of experienced and active network users. Most of the respondents said they use Facebook both for keeping in touch with close friends (79.3%) and maintaining connections with acquaintances (64.5%), while only 4 percent indicated using the network for building new connections. This confirms earlier findings that Facebook is primarily used for maintaining existing ties rather than establishing new ones (Golder, Wilkinson, & Hubennan, 2007; Joinson, 2008). No data regarding socioeconomic status of the respondents were collected. Two types of analysis were used for the research: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data was analysed through two-way analysis of variance and crosstabulations where appropriate. The participants were first asked to answer all the questions of the survey except for the TIPI scale and then they were offered “to share any personal experience, opinions or feelings related to death or grieving on Facebook” as an open-ended question. In total 158 respondents provided textual answers, which were further divided into three groups, according to key words used by the respondents. The first group included respondents who grieved about significant others, the second one contained the responses from those who share their Facebook experience related to grieving about acquaintances and the last group had responses that could not be classified in ei- ther of the first two categories. We manually indexed the responses, outlining the key words that allowed us to evaluate the experience described as positive or negative. The Cronbach’s Alpha value for the TIPI scale was .519.
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